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Alright, there's something that's really been bugging me lately. I know that Insurrection is the resident whipping boy for the poorly thought out final story that felt more like an episode of Voyager than a Star Trek film. However, I'm not retreading any ground that I'm aware of (granted, I don't know if maybe this question was asked a long time ago...).

Here's my beef:

We know from the movie that all Son'a are basically former Baku that were exiled for basically trying to steer the species back to it's technology-loving origins.

We also know that the Son'a have actually subjugated two other species to essentially act as servants in their society.

We ALSO know from DS9 that they had a colony that was manufacturing Ketracel White for the Dominion. They also possessed some pretty advanced technology, such as starships that could give the Enterprise-E a run for its money.

So, here it is. The movie clearly states that there are only about 600 Baku. That little village is basically the whole lot of them. If that's the case... how many Son'a could there possibly be? If the might of 600 Baku who had sworn off the evils of technology was enough to expel all the technology-loving members of their society who would go on to become Son'a, how many Son'a could actually be alive? The Baku only came to the planet in the Briar patch a few hundred years earlier, which again leaves only a few hundred years (probably less, since Ruafu has personal beef with the Baku) to form their own society independent of the Baku. In that short span of time, how could they have possibly amassed the numbers required to have a society that spans multiple worlds and hold two distinct lower species as slaves?

I apologize if this has been answered. I did a Google search looking for it, but nothing came up. Memory Alpha similarly had nothing that discussed this issue.

Well, the best way for the few to conquer the many is by winning allies among them. A few hundred Spanish conquistadors didn't overthrow the Aztec Empire alone; they partnered with the oppressed Mexica peoples who were eager to throw off the empire's brutal yoke, used their manpower to conquer the capital (with a lot of help from smallpox), then put themselves at the top of the existing institutions of power and subverted them to their own ends, becoming the new oppressors of the very people they'd worked with to overthrow the old oppressors.

So maybe the Son'a did something similar. Maybe their empire was originally the empire of one or both of their slave races, and they managed to take it over, a relative few of them using its existing authority infrastructure and resources to maintain a hold over the masses and use their numbers to extend their power across worlds.

The other possibility is that the "mother culture" from which the Ba'ku colonists came, the "solar system on the verge of self-annihilation", is in fact the Son'a home system and is still populated by millions or billions of members of the species.

A group of Son'a left, found longevity, and started calling themselves Ba'ku - and then some of them left, stopped calling themselves Ba'ku and returned home. Reporting on the discovery of longevity, they managed to get the mother culture to rise up in arms against the colonists. The culture gave them the battleships and their crews - but the individuals commanding those battleships were the especially bitter ones who had been exiled by the colonists.

This is, of course, entirely obvious, so I don't know why you felt it necessary to point it out. Of course we're speculating. There are no real Baku or Son'a or anything; they were just imaginary entities created for a movie. So where's the harm in using our imaginations to try to explore the possibilities and flesh out the ideas a little more?

The speculative idea that the original Son'a/Ba'ku home system is the power base of the disgruntled Son'a who were evicted from Ba'ku would explain some things. But another tack would also offer explanations: if the original star system lay in the distant Gamma Quadrant, we would know where the Son'a got their military supertech from, and why they are so adept at making Ketracel White specifically when the UFP struggles with the synthesis.

A group of colonists traveling from Gamma by conventional means might reach Ba'ku within half a dozen decades using this high tech, and then be rejuvenated to the forty-somethings we see by the environment. There'd be no going back home for the Son'a evicted from Ba'ku then - or at least no going back and forth. But anybody with a history of operating with and for the Dominion might be experienced in setting up Dominion-like hierarchies amongst the local primitives...